Wow this week’s practicum was challenging.. so much stuff already up there and I didn’t really think I had anything new to contribute..
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Shirky discussed in this recent reading of the new media production and how it affects us socially in communications, collaborations, and how we live our lives. He went back to some examples we learned about from the Wikinomics reading, and it was refereshing to look at those examples from a different viewpoint. Instead of focusing on how much of a success and leaving out all the other failures like the Wikinomics reading did, Shirky emphasized that it’s very easy to fail running an open source production. In fact he turns the whole definition of failure around, proving that failure within an open source collaboration is actually much better than within the old module. He also talks about how powerful collaboration is, and about love and trust for one another that we collaborate with.
I really thought this week’s reading was interesting; such a huge emphasis on the “love thy neighbor” aspect that Shirky discusses. Sometimes with technology, I find that despite it was invented to bring people together, it does the opposite and distances us. For example, that Instructables.com site; I think it’s a wonderful site, it’s really useful! But I think about how often we ask our parents or peers before on how to do something, and I find that a site like that may actually distance us from those people. Instead of going up to your parents to ask how to do such and such, you could just go online and look it up. That reliance and connection with your parents doesn’t really exist anymore. But at the same time technology does bring people together, just in a different way. It can definitely help in bringing people from places around the world, and in bringing people with the same interests or causes.
The failure section was just as interesting, I have never seen such a positive side to over failure.
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